Temple University ALS Postmortem Core

The National ALS Biorepository has partnered with Temple University ALS Postmortem Core led by Lyle Ostrow, MD, PhD, a neurologist and leading national ALS researcher. Dr. Ostrow’s ongoing efforts at Temple University is providing tissue samples and data to facilitate over 300 different ALS research projects in academic and industry laboratories around the world. Repository at the Temple University ALS Postmortem Core strives to fulfill these requests and provide demographic and clinical data. This collaboration will expand ALS opportunities in the areas of biomarker identification and genetics to augment and increase ALS research.

• Includes  frozen and fixed CNS tissues, liver, and several muscles from ALS/MND and non-neurologic control autopsies. A limited number of other tissues (sural/sciatic nerve, GI tract, skin, etc.) are also available.
• Standard Operating Procedures for tissue dissection, processing, QC analysis, clinical data elements, and neuropathological characterization are specifically optimized to meet the needs of ALS researchers.
• Our dissection method produces the maximum number of individual, optimally sized tissue samples from each ALS-relevant region, while preserving the architecture of the tissue.
  • This minimizes subsequent freeze-thaw and labor that otherwise is necessary when re-dissecting frozen slabs or larger tissue regions, and produces several hundred specimens from each autopsy.
• 95 autopsies, including 19 familial ALS decedents
  • 11 C9orf72 and 5 SOD1
  • 10 with FTD+ALS
  • Cases with mutations in SOD1, ALS4 (SETX), SBMA (AR), and others.
  • 13 Control autopsies

Number of participants that donated Postmortem Samples by Type^*

*Multiple muscles are usually collected per autopsy, so the number of different individual muscles is considerably higher.

Contact the Core Director, Dr. Lyle Ostrow (Lyle.Ostrow@tuhs.temple.edu) or the Core Manager, Dr. Kathleen Wilsbach (Kathleen.Wilsbach@temple.edu) for more information.